1. Field
Embodiments of the invention generally relate to techniques for restoring a system volume from a backup. More specifically, embodiments presented herein provide techniques for performing instant restore by booting a system directly from a backup image and then completing the restore process as a background task.
2. Description of the Related Art
A storage device (e.g., a conventional magnetic disk drive) providing a primary system volume for a computer can fail for a variety of reasons. In large data centers, e.g., disk drives typically have a known “mean time between failure” providing an average of how frequently a disk drive is expected to experience a hardware failure. As another example, data stored on a system volume can be corrupted, deleted, overwritten, or otherwise rendered unusable in many ways. When these events occur, an administrator may have a few options for how to restore a system volume when needed. Restoring a system volume typically requires booting into a recovery environment using a recovery disk storing a limited operating environment, e.g., a WinPE/BartPE environment booted from a CD-rom.
Creating and distributing such disks is a task unto itself. Moreover, restoring a primary system volume using this approach can require some time before the end user can have the restored system available for use. For example, while booted to the limited recovery environment, the user has to wait until the complete backup image is copied to a system volume before doing anything with the system. Once the restore is complete, the user then reboots the system into the primary operating environment. Depending on the size of the backup image, this approach can create a significant downtime for a computer system. In cases where the system being restored provides significant applications/data (e.g., a server for a small business), this downtime can be substantially disruptive.
Similarly, some restore processes can restore a system volume from a backup image located over a network. However, as with a local backup store, the network approach also requires booting into recovery environment (e.g., WinPE) to perform the restore process.